A polymath whose creative talents heed no boundaries, Patrick Kinmonth has a cinematic aesthetic fueled by his love of collaboration—and a joyful sense of history

AFTER 16 YEARS OF DESIGNING OPERAS all over the world, Patrick Kinmonth made his debut as a director in 2008, with a production of Puccini's Madame Butterfly for the Cologne Opera. On the first day of rehearsals, he entered a roomful of enthusiastic, expectant and, he noted, very young singers. "Then, as we started, I had this extraordinary sensation of being in precisely the right place at the right time," Kinmonth recalls. "And I thought, Oh my God, you idiot, this is something you really can do incredibly well."

He's had the same feeling many times since, but that epiphany was a defining moment, tempered by a telling hint of self-recrimination that suggested Kinmonth knew it had been too long in coming. "Permission is the huge issue," he says. "From the beginning, I gave myself permission to not have to have a completely clear definition of what I was going to be or do." Thus empowered, Kinmonth was free to be or do whatever.

The Innovator of the Year Awards 2012

Since he graduated from Oxford in 1977, he has been a painter, an arts editor for British Vogue, an architect, a writer, a curator for, among other institutions, the Metropolitan Museum, a creative right hand to the photographer Mario Testino and an award-winning scenographer, costumer and, now, director. To a degree that is sufficient to set ordinary heads spinning, these commitments have often been juggled simultaneously.

This fall and in the coming months, Kinmonth's production of Don Giovanni debuts in Augsburg; the new retrospective of Testino's work he designed and curated has opened at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts; and "Valentino: Master of Couture," co-curated with Antonio Monfreda, launches at Somerset House in London. With a little less fanfare, Kinmonth's controversial 2011 revision of Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila is being restaged in Geneva, and Göteborg gets his latest collaboration with choreographer Fernando Melo for the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani (formerly the Göteborg Ballet). On top of all that, there will undoubtedly be a full complement of Testino editorials and advertising shoots running concurrently for clients like Burberry and Rolex.

‘"The English may not have been the greatest creators in Europe, but we were brilliant editors, bringing Italy into our gardens and interiors, adding our own practical dynamic to French clothes."’

"He's quite unusual in his world," says Robert Carsen, the director for whom Kinmonth has designed at least a dozen operas (most notably a widely acclaimed and well-traveled production of Wagner's Ring Cycle). "Working in so many disciplines means your approach is intuitive and instinctive, and the more you work in broader domains, the better trained you become." But such breadth also means it takes more than a little intuition to tease out the unifying thread that runs through Kinmonth's work. The Testino exhibition in Boston is curated in a series of subcategories, including one defined by the museum as "Establishment." Kinmonth redefines it thus: "The beauty of tradition is the power to create newness." He is obsessed with the 18th century, but it's the English Revolution, rather than the radical fury of the French, that absorbs him. "The British have a hybrid vigor," he explains. "They are best as mongrels. What I find wonderful about our revolution was we still understood the idea of 'extreme example.' We may not have been the greatest creators in Europe, but we were brilliant editors of all the influences, bringing the functional and the beautiful back from Italy to our gardens and interiors, adding our own practical dynamic to French clothes." In Kinmonth's work, this sensibility translates as physicality—a you-are-there immediacy that is almost cinematic in its appeal to the senses.

The die was cast for Kinmonth as a polymath when he was just a boy. As the youngest of four, born into a medical family who split their time between Ireland and England, he claims he "never felt part of either." Cork meant a rough-and-tumble tribe of Catholic cousins. The English side of the family, his mother's, was Protestant and rich: Meissen porcelain in the cabinet; Poussins on the wall; a nonpareil collection of camellias in the garden. "Ours was not a particularly artistic household at all," says Kinmonth, "but art was somehow in there." His father, a plastic surgeon, would sketch out what he hoped to achieve with his operations. His mother should, Kinmonth feels, have been an actress. As for his own leanings, he painted from an early age and sang like a bird in choirs, "totally unafraid of being artistic." His parents maintained what he now describes as "a benign indifference" to his endeavors, even when, at age nine, he refused to wear anything other than a floor-length green lab coat. Or when, a little later, Kinmonth insisted on swathing himself top-to-toe in a black cloak (he thinks under the influence of a Bergman film). "It would be pouring rain, and I'd set out for the cliffs in my cloak and was never happier. And my parents never complained. Actually, it was my mother who had it made for me."

Clearly primed for drama by the time he hit Oxford, Kinmonth had developed a precocious appreciation of scenography that translated into a string of productions for the Oxford Playhouse, directing, designing and acting. At one point, he stirred a cauldron with Stephen Fry in Macbeth. He also shared a stage with Karl Lagerfeld muse Lady Amanda Harlech in Twelfth Night. "I was madly in love with him," she rhapsodizes even now. "He has an insane nobility that's very ancient." A quality that surely stood Kinmonth in good stead when, several years later, he and Harlech found themselves leading lights in a fashion set that played like an early '80s reanimation of the Bright Young Things. Testino was there. So were Rifat Ozbek, Hamish Bowles, Victoria Fernandez and, eventually, John Galliano. "It was a fantastic, quite experimental time," Harlech remembers, "and Patrick was in the capacity that he always is: the muse."

He was 24 when he started at Vogue in 1981, after winning the magazine's talent competition. As arts editor, Kinmonth did sittings with big names like Lord Snowdon and Bruce Weber, but his job sealed two other relationships that have shaped his life since. One was with Testino, the other with photographer Tessa Traeger, who was regarded as British Vogue's Irving Penn for the still lifes she created for food writer Arabella Boxer's pages. The first story they worked on together was a set in Venice, a city where Kinmonth lived for more than a year after graduation. "From Tessa, Patrick learned a significant appreciation for the art of craft, of people who are really good at what they do in terms of making," says Carsen. "There aren't many people who have that understanding." Traeger and Kinmonth have lived and worked together ever since.

"When I met Patrick," Testino remembers, "he immediately pointed out I should do portraits. I was obsessed with being a fashion photographer so it was difficult to see his point." Testino is now, of course, one of the world's premier photographic portraitists. "He was right all along," the photographer concedes. "But for many years, that's what Patrick did—he helped others better their skills." And that's really the point of this elliptical backstory. Kinmonth was always perfectly happy to hide his light under the bushel of others. "Putting my head over the parapet has not been my favorite thing," he admits. "There may be all sorts of reasons I didn't want to take that responsibility artistically"—the most benign rationale being that Kinmonth simply loved working with other people.

Artists often talk about their "process." The way Kinmonth tells it, his process has always been about that permission thing. "If you give yourself only permission to work for yourself—be number one, all or nothing—you might prevail but you might just as easily lose. But if you give yourself permission, first of all, to collaborate, to enjoy what other people bring, it doesn't have to be 'rule the roost'—you become part of a team and make something."

If it's reasonable to say that the essence of a truly successful collaboration is generosity of spirit, then that's one more thing Kinmonth was born to. "I think it's essential to have the dynamic of challenge in a given relationship," he declares, but at the same time, what longtime collaborators like Monfreda recognize is Kinmonth's ability to transmute challenge. "One of the first things he taught me was that working is about solving problems, not making problems," Monfreda says of a professional relationship that has produced some of the most memorable exhibitions of the past decade. "It's very challenging to work with him, but he loves to give credit"—the upcoming Valentino show at Somerset House being a case in point. Monfreda claims their main idea usually comes to them in the first few minutes they investigate a new space, and given the long catwalk-like room they had to work with at Somerset House, it seemed obvious to stage the exhibition as a fashion show—except that it's the visitors who will be walking down the catwalk and the mannequins sitting in the audience. "You're looking at the clothes in the service of another idea," Kinmonth explains. "That's almost a directorial idea. Can the clothes bring you into that jet-set Valentino world you're discussing?" Carsen insists this is one of Kinmonth's greatest talents: "Often you want people to be wearing real clothes, not costumes, and when people are wearing 18th- or 19th-century dress, which doesn't feel contemporary to us, it's not as easy. But as a costume designer, Patrick is a fantastic clothes designer."

Kinmonth's worktable certainly testifies to that. It is littered with costume ideas for upcoming productions that show his knack for vernacular detail, even in a 16th-century Spanish ruff. "I would love to do a fashion collection," he admits. "Fashion is an extension of the opera costume–making process, but it serves to illuminate the zeitgeist of fashion rather than the raison d'être of an opera libretto and a score."

"Why should you restrict yourself?" Carsen wonders. "If you do more than one thing, you're supposed to be a dilettante. But, with Patrick, none of it is about being expert, it's about being passionate and minding enough to be curious." Aside from the fact that passion itself is innately persuasive, Kinmonth's insatiable curiosity has helped mold a lively signature for everything to which he applies his hand. A sterling example is his first show for the Met, "Dangerous Liaisons," in 2004, which explored the relationship between fashion, furniture and art in the 18th century. Kinmonth designed tableaux vivants that recreated vignettes from contemporary prints: a woman falling in a faint; a husband seducing a maid; a hairdresser up a ladder; tempering a sky-high hairdo celebrating some event of the moment—all of them frozen in mid-activity. "You saw it almost as a play, with an opening scene and a grand reveal," recalls Anna Wintour, benefit chair of the MET's annual Costume Institute Gala. "The room was quite imposing, but Patrick saw a way to bring static things to life, to make them accessible, with so much wit." The coup de grâce was the faux sunlight that streamed through the windows of the Wrightsman Galleries. The sense of "you-are-there" was so over- whelming that Jayne Wrightsman immediately asked Kinmonth to redo the rooms when the show ended.

The same intimate approach will be applied to aspects of the Valentino show in Somerset House. In 2007, Kinmonth and Monfreda designed an exhibition at the Ara Pacis in Rome that was a soaring, imperial envoi to Valentino's career in fashion. In London, the emphasis is more intimate. "We have pictures that were never meant to be seen by anyone except Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti for their own albums and memories," says Kinmonth. "I was very keen for those pictures to inform the work so you can see it's not just coming from some beautifully organized, synthesized, perfected universe, but it actually comes out of the muddle of life—lots of travel, lots of attempts, lots of second-goes. There's a roughness that makes you feel like you are there."

And, finally, Don Giovanni, which Kinmonth has re-situated in 18th-century Venice, home to Casanova and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose roots in Venetian street theatre would have given the opera's original productions an abrasive topical edge as recognizable to contemporary audiences as Shakespeare's words were to the crowds at the Globe. "The orthodoxy in opera has become to radically modernize at all costs, to strip away the historical context and put it as fiercely and directly into modern life as you possibly can," says Kinmonth. "And that was definitely necessary. Opera was mired in a 19th-century way of doing things. But now is the moment when we need to go beyond the new orthodoxy. Let's try and find a way to enter into the original spirit of what this piece was about, to play with the tension between an 18th-century text and a 21st-century context."

Shakespeare continues to be a reference point. "He has it—the greatest poetry, the most ordinary, recognizable characters." And that clarifies Kinmonth's challenge with opera. "How to make it conversational," he muses. "Especially when opera is great conversations." Meeting that challenge would undoubtedly go a long way to addressing the never-ending debate about opera's place in modern culture. Kinmonth, for one, seems to have latched on to an analogy that is alluringly accessible. "When you direct opera, you have the possibility to do something very minutely because the music gives you the total framework: The aria starts here, ends there, in precisely three and a half minutes. It's the closest thing to making a movie but, instead of a cam- era, it's done like a rehearsal, in front of an audience." That's why he feels the preeminence of Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli in 20th-century opera is no coincidence. "They both came from film and they revitalized opera with the kind of behavior you'd see in a movie."

Again, the you-are-there immediacy. "The pinch of your soul that makes you think you're real," Kinmonth calls it. "A sense of discovery that is actually the most exciting thing, because it's proof that you are in the moment. That I suppose, loftily, would be my operatic ambition. You're sitting in an opera house with a lot of other people and you suddenly think, Oh my God, I'm actually alive, I am here, this is happening, and now it's over and if I don't remember it, it's gone. And there's no way of pulling it back."

And right there, in that romantic, melancholy acknowledgment of the necessity and the transience of beauty, is the key that unlocks the protean Patrick Kinmonth.

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